2010... time to move! http://SarahMaloy.Wordpress.com

New decade, new website. I'm making a move to Wordpress! If you enjoy reading and following my blog here, please transfer over to http://sarahmaloy.wordpress.com where I will be posting [hopefully more often] from now on. Let me know what you think of the new site!

xx Sarah

A few music sites you've probably heard of, but may not have taken advantage of:

1. Last.fm

Last.fm is my most recently-discovered, and current favorite, social networking site. My last.fm profile can be found here. On my profile, you can see everything from my most-played artists of the past seven days, the Beatles and Pendulum, to my most-played artist of all time, Fall Out Boy. Friends can also connect on last.fm and see what each other are listening to and have listened to. You can connect to a friend's or other user's library and listen to their music, or browse through artists and genres and listen to songs that way. Last.fm is a great way to expose yourself to new artists and styles of music that you may like. It is also an interesting catalogue of your own and your friends' music-listening habits. For example, I learned that I need to lay off of Fall Out Boy for a while, because 3,000+ plays is far too many. And I learned that a few of my friends, Catie Vernon and Jordan Fish, have great taste in music and I should listen to their suggestions more often. [As I often find myself listening to their libraries when I am at a loss for a song to play.] Last.fm is a great site for discovering new music and connecting with friends who have similar tastes.

2. Blip.fm

Blip.fm is another site I had heard of for a while, but only just discovered and started using. My blip.fm profile is connected to my Twitter, and whenever I "blip" a new song, it posts as a tweet. To blip a song, you merely search the title and artist, add your own comments, and a link is posted to liste to the song. Blip.fm allows you to "be a DJ" and broadcast your favorite songs for all of your Twitter followers and Blip friends to hear. You can select one song, or create and entire stream of music for listeners to play. Friends can follow your blips, and you can give "props" when you like music that another person has played. I also have my blips set to update on my Facebook, so that my friends can see what I'm listening to and be exposed to new music.

3. Strike Gently

Strike Gently is a pop culture gossip, news, and downloading site that I have often heard about and just recently looked into. SG is famous for their internet drama, as the website often offends both generic pop-punk bands and other music news sites. It's raw, brutal, and occasionally X-rated, so some may take offense... but I prefer to just laugh. Movies and television shows can also be streamed from the Strike Gently site, and many SG posts include links to download songs, albums, movies, or music videos, of course with a disclaimer which explains that such downloads are for promotional purposes only and should be deleted within 24 hours. I've found everything from the newly-leaked Lady Gaga album to a stream of New Moon on this site. I've also discovered new bands such as Ghostland Observatory. It's an interesting website which really enforces the idea of "try before you buy."

Blurring the lines between traditional and new media

Check out my ZooLoo blog post, "Blurring the lines between traditional and new media." Be sure to comment and tag your tweets with #ZooLoo to let me know what you think!

I found this comic when I was writing the blog... It wasn't completely relevant, but I still liked it!

Spread the word!

My ZooLoo Logo
Originally uploaded by sarahmaloy

Are you ready to ZooLoo? Take my ZooLoo logo and post it wherever you network-- Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Let me know how you're spreading the ZooLoo word. Anything you post will help me, so let's show everyone at ZooLoo the kind of buzz that Sarah Maloy can create online! Also be sure to join the Facebook group.

I can't fall asleep... So of course I wrote a blog about "Fight Club" and Fall Out Boy.

I know it's completely cliche to be obsessed with Fight Club, but every night as I'm drifting off to sleep, I find myself staring at the Fight Club poster mounted beside my bed, and I begin to analyze its every detail. This is highly escalated on nights such as tonight, when I find myself unable to fall asleep. And of course, tonight of all nights, I was looking at my Fight Club poster when Fall Out Boy's "20 Dollar Nose Bleed" began to play and I was graced with the sounds of Patrick Stump asking, "Where will I be when I wake up next to a stranger on a passenger plane? Permanent jet lag, please take me back, please take me back, please take me back."


I really have little purpose for this blog, and I might make it private in the morning, but I just had to write this to get it out of my head. I could probably be happy spending the rest of my life listening to Fall Out Boy and watching Fight Club. There are an infinite number of things to analyze, discuss, expand upon, etc. in those songs and that movie. In fact, I think that one night when I'm not five and a half hours from morning, I'm going to write an entire entry about Fight Club. I'll include my thoughts, my ideas, my analyzations, and my questions about the movie, and hopefully we can all discuss it in the comments.

Flickr... I took the plunge.

So I finally got a Flickr account! I don't anyone who has one, so if you do... become one of my contacts! I'm always the first person I know who gets any social media account, so I'm sure I will be able to soon bring friends to the Flickrverse. I love being the first of my friends to dive into a social media site, as I did with Xanga, Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc. It makes me feel cool to be fully versed in something while others are struggling to understand. Plus I love teaching people new things on the web! =]

You can check out my Flickr at www.Flickr.com/people/SarahMaloy. Right now it's just a few obnoxious Photobooth pictures of myself, but I plan on soon uploading all of my concert and politics pictures, my ZooLoo "buzz" pictures, and whatever else I find in my computer archives!

Have you missed me? I've been getting ready to ZooLoo! And I'm ready. Are you?

Although this blog is definitely not a "This is my life. Aren't you so interested?" sort of blog, I decided to post something letting everyone know what I've been up to lately... because it's exciting!

I'm a Twitter frequenter. It's a bit of an obsession... but everyone already knows that. I've recently started following the #printern hashtag, and I saw a post for an internship in Scottsdale, AZ with a soon-to-be-launched website: ZooLoo.

I looked into the job and it basically looked amazing. The application was unique, but in my world, fairly typical. I had to submit a resume... and an application video. Just like I did for Warped Tour. Well apparently second time is the charm, because my video was infinitely better, and I felt much more confident about it. While some of the applicants went the route of creative, commercial-esque videos, I chose to just talk about myself and let my personality show. I've gotten better at talking to a camera, and I felt like this video was a good reflection of my personality. I also worked to create a buzz about ZooLoo, and when they put the interns up to a viral vote, I worked to create a buzz about me and ZooLoo! Apparently something I did worked, because I made it to the second round of the intern contest.

I'm really excited about this whole thing. While I don't yet know exactly what ZooLoo is... all my research leads me to believe I will like it. And I definitely think that I could fit into the world of the ZooLoo company. So be sure to check out ZooLoo, check out the other applicants and contest details on the ZooLoo blog, and help me to spread the ZooLoo word! Promote what I'm sure will be an awesome website, and help me out by posting blog entries, twittering about ZooLoo, joining my Facebook group, and just doing anything you see fit!

You guys are the greatest, and I'm so excited about the community I've been able to mobilize these past few days. I can't wait to see it grow, and I hope I can also help to grow the ZooLoo community this summer!

"A sense of freedom and exhilaration that can't be found elsewhere."

Every summer, I spend my days working, spending time with friends, and just relaxing. But for the past few years, something has taken over and become the highlight of my entire summer-- the Warped Tour. A fifteen-year-old tradition, Warped Tour is the one day each summer that absolutely cannot be missed.

Each July, I pack up my drawstring bag full of water, sunscreen and cash, and drive an hour down to Cincinnati (always getting lost along the way) to stand in line with thousands of other fans. Upon entrance to the venue, teens and adults alike rush to the Vans tent to see what time their favorite bands are playing. Warped Tour attendees are quite a diverse group, and with approximately 100 bands performing each day, there are many styles of music-- something for almost everyone. Even with such diversity, Warped is a community-- a family.

At the end of 2008, WarpedTourDoc began following me on Twitter. I checked them out and saw that they were running a contest giving a way a free DVD and a ticket to the 2009 Warped Tour. The documentary sounded interesting and of course I could use a free ticket, so I began entering a few contests. After winning the "Most Embarassing WT Moment" contest, I received the DVD in the mail. A few weeks later, I watched it.

And I have to tell you-- Nothing could capture the spirit of the Warped Tour better than this documentary.

Right from the opening, which shows the show being organized and the stages being set up, I was intrigued. I've never been to a show before it started, so already I was being exposed to a part of the tour which I had not previously known.

The documentary works smoothly from one of the first few scenes in which a worker says, "Warped Tour has gone soft, yo," to the ending "feel-good montage," which captured the family feel of Warped, and made me incomparably excited for the 2009 show.

During the 91-minute film, directed by Jonathan Rach, I learned more about the Warped Tour than I ever could have in my nineteen years of life. When a tour, mostly targeted at teenagers, spans fifteen years, there are very few fans who have been around since the beginning. The documentary, The Warped Tour: A Concert, A Culture, An Entire Generation, covers the tour from the very beginning and includes onstage, backstage, tour bus, and fan moments that couldn't be seen anywhere else.

The documentary covers the politics seen at Warped Tour in a balanced and uncontroversial way that is perfect for a show that is about the people and their expression, more than it is actually about the political views of those people.

There is so much more I could say about Warped Tour and about this documentary, but this is already the longest blog I've written to date. I may add some more later, but for now I just leave you with my strong recommendation to check out this documentary and, if you haven't already, you should definitely check out the Warped Tour this summer.


Photos by Sarah Maloy at Cincinnati Warped Tour 2008
Top Right: Mike Ski of The A.K.A.s.
Bottom: A crowd watching The Gym Class Heroes perform "Peace Sign Up, Index Down" on the main stage.